


peace has a tightrope yet to walk

by nenyanaryavilya



Category: Ender's Game - All Media Types
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Ender's Jeesh Dynamics, Friendship/Love, Gen, M/M, Multi, Nightmares, to ender's game not so much the shadow series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-27
Updated: 2020-12-27
Packaged: 2021-03-10 21:48:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,626
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28364196
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nenyanaryavilya/pseuds/nenyanaryavilya
Summary: The nightmares do not start until after Ender leaves for Command school. This is, in itself, a mercy.Alai, his dreams, and the pain of loving a monster.
Relationships: Alai/Ender Wiggin
Comments: 4
Kudos: 26





	peace has a tightrope yet to walk

The nightmares do not start until after Ender leaves for Command school. This is, in itself, a mercy.

Alai has never had fanciful dreams. He’s never soared through the sky or had dinner with the characters of a movie. Even the good dreams were rooted in truth: Eid al-Fitr with his family, a good mark on his intersystem navigation exam, a freetime practice that went well. As such, it follows that his nightmares are also realistic: getting yelled at by a teacher is the one that appears most often.

This one is just to the left of the truth. In the dream, he leaves the mess hall sooner. He hears Dink screaming from the bathroom. He runs, but his feet are rooted in molasses.

When he gets there, he shoves past the teachers who are surrounding the doorway. He looks down and sees the water, pink and troubled, seeping toward the drain. He looks up, and there is Bonzo Madrid, shoulders heaving, Ender’s blood dripping off his hands.

He wakes with a start.

Silently, still breathing quickly, he runs through his list of truths — he is Alai Bilal; he was born in Buraidah, Saudi Arabia; he was sent to Battle School at age 7; he is 11 now, almost 12. He has been fast friends with Ender Wiggin since he met him proper, in the bunkroom for their launch groups. Twelve days ago, Bonzo Madrid attacked Ender in the bathroom and Ender fought him off. Bonzo was sent home. Ender was sent to Command school. Ender will probably save the entire human race from the buggers someday.

Ender is safe and alive. Bonzo is not. No one will come after Ender again. Alai tries to even out his breathing.

The Salamander logo on the wall of his commander’s bunk does not help him calm himself one bit.

* * *

Alai is up, showered, dressed and quietly praying over his desk by the time the teachers slip the battle paper under his door.

JULIAN DELPHIKI, RABBIT ARMY, 0900

He smiles a little to himself, wry. Of course it would be Bean. Of course it would be me. Now that Ender’s gone, there’s no point to this school anymore, no point to any of it. Why not throw his closest friends at one another in the battleroom, see what sticks?

He walks briskly to his army’s barracks. It has been less than a fortnight since their last commander was sent home, and the tensions still run high. There are boys here who still hate Ender, Alai thinks. There are boys here who knew he was going to be attacked and said nothing. But Ender is alive, and Bonzo is — Alai doesn’t think about it. He saw the blood on Ender’s back. The IF has lots of crazy surgeries. There’s a decent chance that Bonzo could survive a blow from the back of Ender’s head, even one that meant that much blood.

_But it was Ender,_ a tiny voice at the back of Alai’s head says. _It was Ender, and he doesn’t fight to win. He fights to finish. He fights to never fight again._

Alai ignores it. That’s the competition talking, he thinks. That’s the teachers, trying to get us to hate each other. Well, they can’t get me, he thinks. They can’t make me hate Ender.

He claps his hands twice to get the attention of Salamander— of his army. “Hurry to breakfast! We have a battle with Rabbit at 0900, so I want everyone warming up in the grav room at 0825, ready to head for the corridor.”

Some grumbles, but mostly acquiescence. It had been the first thing Alai did as commander: reshuffle the leadership. The meanest, oldest boys had been Bonzo’s toon leaders who had gone with him to attack Ender, and they’d been iced too. Their seconds had thought they’d take over, and Alai gently but firmly disabused them of that notion; after a practice skirmish in the battleroom, he handed the reigns to the Salamander soldiers that showed the most promise and charisma. It hadn’t failed him yet.

He follows his soldiers to breakfast, but doesn’t eat. He drinks a little water, smiles at his toon leaders when they try to hype him up. He’s supposed to be eating in the commander’s mess, even though he’s never won a battle, but he wants to be here, with his men. Let them take him. He’s learned his lesson.

* * *

The battle should be a massacre.

  
Bean is ten times smarter than Alai, and he isn’t hated by a quarter of his army. Rabbit should have obliterated Salamander in minutes. Instead, Salamander wins by a decent margin, with Bean apparently telling his toon leaders to do whatever they wanted and not even bother trying to play the game.

When Anderson gives Alai the hook, he unfreezes everyone at once. He lets his men form up, notices that even after defeat, the Rabbits are still oriented in reverse of the Salamanders. He lets Bean concede gracefully.

After, on their way to the showers, Alai gently hip-checks him. “Ho, Bean, what was that?”

“Ho, Alai, you be wanting praise now?” Bean is still so much smaller than the rest of them. So much younger. Alai would guess he’s barely seven.

“You could have beaten me in your sleep and you know it. Why didn’t you?”

Bean shrugs. “What’s the point? Will we be out there fighting little boys in flash suits? No. This is a distraction, and everyone knows it. Command potential? Who cares. No one here needs command potential. Ender’s gonna lead the army. All we need to do is learn some strategies. I can do that same winning or losing.”

Pausing at the fork that would take him back toward Salamander barracks, Alai thinks for just a minute. “I guess that’s true.”

Ever sharp, Bean picks up on it. “But?”

“But they sent Ender to Command School,” Alai says, “and I’m making sure they send me too.”

* * *

Another day, another battle. Sometimes they win, sometimes not; either way, the commanders group up in the battleroom after, discussing their strategies and how to win better next time. The ranking board is ignored. Everyone knows there’s no point to it anymore.

Another night, another horror. Sometimes Bonzo cracks Ender’s head open right in the battleroom, sometimes he flashes a knife and stabs him between the ribs in the barracks. It gets boring, repetitive.

The fantasy game flashes Ender’s face on one of the wolf-children, and Alai stops playing. It’s pointless anyway. Everything is moving so quickly. There are probably fewer than ten days before they pick whoever is going to be moved up to Tactical or Pre-Command. It isn’t hard to tell that the teachers are preparing for some kind of escalation, with the way they’ve shattered the battleroom game. They’re not planning to need it for much longer.

The day before it ends, Alai and Salamander fight Petra’s Phoenix army. She’s flexible and effective; her tactics flow like water. Alai, who has been working with his toon leaders to implement a more responsive strategy, gets very close to beating her. In the end, it’s a draw, with only four Phoenixes left unfrozen. They shake hands.

“I wonder how much longer they’re gonna make us pretend,” she says after, on the way to the mess. “How much more can we learn from this? There hasn’t been a new launch group in months.”

“Whatever it is, when it ends, I hope you’re there.” Alai palms the tray line. “Ender could use a fluid toon leader like you.”

“Ender doesn’t want me. He’d be stupid if he did, and he’s not stupid.” Petra grabs her drink, her tray sliding along the conveyor ahead of Alai’s. “You think that’s what this is? Picking out who’s gonna be Ender’s backups, when the time comes?”

“That’s what I’m trying to be. Maybe they’re gonna freeze him, send him into sleep and zip him around the moon until it’s time to fight the third invasion.” Alai shrugs. “I wanna be on that ship.”

“No you don’t, fartbrain.” Petra grabs her tray off the line and balances it against her hip. “FTL travel? Everyone you ever knew and loved would be dead, or ancient. Ender is one kid that you met five years ago.”

Alai grabs his tray and starts walking toward the tables, making Petra follow him. “With or without me, they’re going to make Ender command the human fleet. He’s going to lose everyone he loves too. The least I can do for humanity is make sure their savior has a shoulder to cry on.” _If he has to sacrifice everything, at least I won’t have to sacrifice him._

That night, the dream shifts. Alai still pounds down the hallway toward the bathroom, still hears Dink’s screaming at Bonzo to stop, still ducks under the teachers’ arms and stands in the pink water.

The bathroom is hot, so hot, like he’s been taken to Jahannam after all. Steam clouds the air. Through it, he sees Ender — not dead, but victorious, Bonzo’s body lying supine on the slick floor.

There is no sound but the hiss of steam and the drip, drip, drip of blood and water. Slowly, Ender turns his head to look at Alai.

  
His mouth is red. His teeth are sharp and bloody.

He is crying.

* * *

The next day, Alai gets his orders for Tactical School.

He boards the shuttle with Bean, Petra, Dink, Fly, Han Tzu, Crazy Tom, and Shen.

“Tactical School, eh?” Dink says when Alai straps into his seat on the Condor. “On your way to see your boyfriend?”

“Shut up, Dink, you’re just mad because nobody likes you,” Petra says, and kicks him in the shin. They start arguing, Alai just settles in for take-off.

He can feel eyes burning a hole into his neck. “Bean, if you’re gonna stare at me, can you wait until after takeoff? I’m worried that the seat belts aren’t cut for little kids, and if you don’t pay attention, you’ll float away.”

“A short joke? Come on, you’re better than that.” Nevertheless, Bean stops staring him down. “Worried I’m going to tell the other little boys and girls about your big bad crush on Andrew Wiggin? They already know. You aren’t subtle.”

“I’m not — come on, are you really into schoolyard gossip now?”

“Oh, you think you’re the only one?” Bean gestures at the other students prepping for take-off. “Everyone here loves him. Everyone he’s ever worked with loves him, except for the ones who hate him, and they’re all gone. Get in line.”

Alai doesn’t say anything out loud. He just shrugs and looks back down at his hands, at the buckle on the seat belt that he’s wearing.

Inside, though: inside, he says _I don’t have to wait in line. Everyone else needs to wait, behind me. I was first. I loved him first._

* * *

Tactical School is like Battle School, minus the armies and the competition. There’s no need for it, here, in a place that everyone knows is a bus stop on the way to Command School. 

They don’t even have time to find out how the thirteen-and-fourteen-and-fifteen-year-olds react to having a slot of eleven and twelve year olds thrown into their classes, because a week after they arrive, Alai and the rest — including Carn Carby, and a few other seniors who were graduated back when Ender left — are being packed into the Condor and sent off the Command School.

Command School is on an asteroid called Eros. Everyone who knows where it is has a permanent assignment there. The teacher assigned to bring them up to speed keeps droning on about how special and private and privileged an opportunity they have, to be brought to this incredibly top secret place, but Alai is no longer listening.

Instead, his mind is drifting, wildly, to the reality that in half a year he will see Ender again. Who will he be, with these ten or so months behind him? He would be eleven now, and trained for all sorts of command that they couldn’t hope to understand yet. Has he made the students of Command School love him, as we did at Battle School?

Has he made them hate him? Is there another Bonito de Madrid, hiding in the tunnels of a dead asteroid, sixteen years old and ready to kill, and no one there to protect Ender from him?

The thought comes so quickly that Alai feels as if he’s been struck by lightning, shorn in half like a pine tree on a mountain. Only Shen notices the way he clenches his hands in his lap until the knuckles go white.

When they are dismissed for free time before lights out, Alai goes straight to his bunk. He curls up in his bed, arms around his knees, and does what he has not allowed himself to do since his first week at Battle School: he sobs.

* * *

The dream is almost always the other way, now. Alai bursts into the bathroom to see Ender standing over Bonzo’s body, sometimes with bloody teeth, sometimes with claws instead of hands. Every time, he is weeping.

In more recent nightmares, Ender has started to speak. He screams that he didn’t mean to hurt him, won’t someone help him, why didn’t anyone stop him. Even in the dreams where Bonzo is gutted or beheaded or torn to shreds, Ender begs Alai to save him, that he didn’t want to hurt him, that if Bonzo had just left him alone he wouldn’t have had to do anything.

He weeps, and weeps, and every time does not realize Bonzo is dead. He weeps, and Alai is left frozen in place, unable to move even a finger to help him, to help anyone. Still and useless.

* * *

They make it to Command School already tired.

They were run through drill after drill, taught how to use the simulators that would comprise most of their education here. Once they land, they’re immediately herded into realtime practice, with Bean acting in what they all know will be Ender’s role, even if the teachers won’t say it.

Alai tries asking, just once: “Where’s Ender? When will we get to see him?”

The teacher assigned to oversee their training on the simulator doesn’t even look at him. “Andrew Wiggin is being trained separately. If a time comes when you will need to interact, you will be notified when appropriate.”

So Ender was here. Ender was here, and they were doing it to him again: separating him from everyone, making him think nobody cared about him enough to help him.

They’re going to break him, Alai thought. Snap him in half and crush the pieces under their International Fleet-issued combat boots, and they’re going to thank him for it.

So they train, and train, and pretend they aren’t all waiting for the day when Bean is down with the others and no one else is in his place, and they’re told they can look up to talk to their commander.

They all know who it is. They all humor Alai when he says, “me first,” quiet, under his breath.

He fits the headset on. “Salaam,” he whispers.

“Alai,” he hears, in the voice he’s lost for almost a year. Ender sounds tired and distant, but above all profoundly, desperately relieved. “Alai,” he repeats.

“And me, the dwarf,” Bean pipes up.

“Bean.” Ender greets, in turn.

One by one, the others introduce themselves. Ender seems to lose a little bit more of his resigned tone with each name he calls.

Is Alai deluding himself, after the better part of a year, when he thinks: he sounded most relieved at my voice? Is he just that desperate, that he can’t factor in knowing that Ender didn’t know his squadrons would be commanded by his old friends, and that after Alai and Bean, he’d figured out the game?

It doesn’t matter. Even if Ender doesn’t care, even if he just sees Alai as another old Battle School comrade, he’s back. They’re back. He can breathe again.

* * *

They fight training battle after training battle, each one harder than the last. After they deploy the little doctor in their first graded combat game, the simulation never makes it useful a second time. Alai can hear it in Ender’s voice: he’s exhausted. He relies heavily on Alai, and Petra, and that weight feels overwhelming at times.

And yet, Alai knows: it’s only a fraction of the weight Ender himself bears.

He does not eat with them. He goes to sleep after them, wakes up earlier. There’s a Maori man with him, who leans over his shoulder and does not stop when Ender tries to flinch away.

Alai tries to lighten things a little, once, by joking with him: “Ho, Ender! You're too kind to us,” he says, making sure to lay the joking tone on heavily. “Why don't you get annoyed with us for not being brilliant every moment of every practice? If you keep coddling us like this we'll think you like us.”

The other squadron leaders laugh. Ender says nothing. He waits for the laughter to die out into an awkward, painful silence.

“Again,” he says, quiet but firm. “And this time, without the self-pity.”

He rides them harder. When he gives commands, he sounds almost frantic, almost paranoid. In their strategy sessions, he does a worse and worse job of concealing how heavy this training is wearing on him, how desperate he is for them to be perfect.

“Sometimes we make mistakes,” Petra tries, as if that would change the fact that they’re up at four every morning and not in bed until ten at the earliest.

Ender doesn’t even stop his vivisection of their last battle’s errors. “And sometimes we don’t.”

Alai can see it in him. He is coming toward that same precipice that he met in Battle school. Who will he square off against, this time? What game will he break, because the adults around him don’t know when to stop grinding him into the ground?

He stops Bean on the way out of the simulators after Petra falls unconscious during the battle. “You were there, right? After Ender fought Bonzo?”

“You crazy in the head, Alai?” Bean looks close to passing out too, even if his voice is energetic as ever. “Why would you ask me about that now?”

“He was dead, wasn’t he? He didn’t go home. He didn’t get iced. He was just dead.”

Bean grimaces, and looks at the ground. “I don’t know. I didn’t see.”

“You’re lying. You’re lying and you’re too tired to even do it well.” Alai leans against the wall and for a second he thinks he’s going to sleep there. “If we’re so tired, imagine how Ender’s doing.”

“Ender’s tougher than he looks.”

“Ender’s not as tough as the teachers want him to be.”

“None of us are as tough as they want us to be. That’s why they keep pushing us so hard.” Bean shoulders past Alai, not unkind, just abrupt. “Go to bed. We can’t have another day like that, not any of us.”

He’s right. None of them could afford the losses like they had today, between Petra’s ships overextending and the others trying to come in and clean up after her. So Alai sleeps, and wakes, and fights battles, and wins, and sometimes takes losses.

Then it happens.

One minute they’re passing orders back and forth, communicating between themselves and getting orders from Ender. He’s zeroed in on Alai’s unit, having them practice a modified version of the bullet formation they’d done back at the beginning of the graded sims.

“Alai, take your. Um. Take your left subgroup — your —” Ender says, and then a sound like a high pitched electric whine and silence.

Alai panics. It’s just a drill, not a graded battle, so: he rips off his headset and throws open the door to the simulator. He runs, headed for the senior command sim, the one where Ender runs their practices and their graded battles. He bumps into a teacher on the way, grabs them by the arm: “Andrew Wiggin just went unresponsive during practice, ma’am, I think we need a medic.”

He keeps running. An alarm sounds, the walls light up with directed lightstrips to tell the medical teams where to go. When he gets to the door of Ender’s simulation room, it’s locked. He pounds on it, as if that would make it give way under his hands.

It opens.

Ender is standing there, bloodied, still palming the door-key. His face is scratched and bleeding. A quick glance behind him shows a similar blood-pattern on his command console. He must have collapsed and hit it on the way down.

“Alai,” he says, sluggishly, as if in a dream, and then collapses again.

It is all Alai can do to keep him from hitting the ground. He’s burning hot, eaten up with a fever the thermal sensors that check them over each day should have recognized. How long had he been sick, and the teachers just kept letting him come here, letting him work himself to death?

He’s just a child, Alai thinks. We’re all just children, and no one cares if we die, as long as they get what they want.

Alai is not one to hate. He finds hate a harsh emotion, ugly, unworthy. Anyone he dislikes, he can do so without giving them the space in his mind for hate. But right now, with Ender’s bloody head cradled in his lap, radiating heat, Alai thinks he hates the teachers that let this happen.

No, this goes higher than them. He hates the man who is always bending over Ender, making him tired and afraid; he hates Colonel Graff and Major Anderson and everyone else who signed off on letting them torture a child until he was a perfect little monster, a weapon they could point at whoever they chose. Not caring what it would do to him.

Well, they failed. He’s not a monster, and if he is, then Alai doesn’t care. They wanted to isolate him, to keep him away from others, so he would never think he could rely on anyone for help. But Alai will be there, to help him, even when he doesn’t know it. Alai will love him in all the ways the people who were sworn to care for him didn’t. 

* * *

After they’ve peeled Alai away from Ender, lifted him onto an emergency indoor skimmer and sent him off for medical care; after they’ve sent Alai back to his quarters to get some rest before tomorrow’s practice, he dreams.

He was expecting this, as he drifted off. Ender is standing over Bonzo as always, but his face is not full of teeth, and his hands are not claws. The dripping sound of blood is coming from his shoulders, the back of his head: just the way it was when it happened.

“I’m sorry,” he says. His voice is tight and exhausted. “I didn’t mean to. I told him not to hurt me. I told him I would hurt him. Why did they make me hurt him? Why won’t any of you help me?”

Alai is frozen as always. _This is boring,_ he can hear himself think, the little part of him that knows this is a dream. _We’ve seen this before._

As if in answer, there is movement behind him. Colonel Graff strides out, in full uniform, sidearm included — a real, metal-bullets gun, not the laser blasters IF officers usually had.

He raises it and takes aim.

Alai tries to scream for him to stop, tries to move, but he stays frozen.

Ender’s voice has become higher, more panicked. It cracks, like the teenager he is now. “Please, I didn’t mean to hurt him. You have to help him. Why did you leave him with me? You knew I could hurt him. You knew he would make me. Alai, help me!”

Alai wakes up.

This time, there is nothing to make him calm again.

* * *

For three days, Ender is gone. Bean runs the drills. There are no graded battles.

For three days, Alai has time to think. He tries to sneak into Ender’s rooms; he and Dink even make it, one time, and he holds his clammy hand as Dink sings some soothing melody in Dutch. They’re caught about forty minutes later, and told an official reprimand will go on their records for breaking curfew and being found in a non-designated area.

Alai doubts it. Dink openly laughs at the idea.

So, for three days, Alai considers their battles. The simulators at Battle School hadn’t been anywhere near as advanced as this one, but that doesn’t mean the technology didn’t exist. What really got him was the fact that they’d never once been told how they were going to cope with time-lag, in the real thing. Why have a simulator so advanced that Alai could practically see the HUD of every fighter as high-definition as he would in person, but not have it set to cope with FTL communication?

The more he thought on it, the less it made any sense. He poses the question at lunch, one day, to his table with about half the jeesh sitting around it. Petra shrugs. Bean gives him a considering look, then says, “you figure it out, smart guy.” Fly kicks him under the table, and Bean throws a fork at him. “What? Alai always be on his spiritual journey.”

“Maybe they don’t want to overwhelm us all at once,” Carn Carby says, and they all have a good laugh at the idea.

When Ender comes back, he’s dull and blunted. Not in the sense that he’s lost his skill — he’s sharper than ever, cutting through their latest battle like a surgeon cuts through flesh. But his voice is empty, and when the battle is over, he doesn’t even dismiss the squadron leaders. There’s just the sound of his headset disconnecting, and then nothing.

The battles go on like that. They’ve become limited to once a day, and they tend to let everyone out of practice earlier, let them go to bed sooner. It doesn’t matter. Everyone is so exhausted, they barely notice. They carry out their orders, and they do it well, but outside the simulator room, they’re all walking dead.

* * *

When the nightmare comes next, Alai is already in the bathroom.

“Help me. Alai, help me, please!” Ender is bleeding too, this time, like he was that day in the simulator; bleeding from his face, his mouth, his hand. “Please, I don’t want to hurt anyone. You have to help me. I’m so frightened.”

Colonel Graff pushes past Alai, raises his sidearm, and shoots Ender in the head. Alai cannot even scream as he collapses into a heap, his blood mingling with Bonzo’s in the draining water. He thinks he can taste Ender’s blood on his mouth. He can hear the crack of his skull hitting the tile as it echos endlessly in the room.

The dream rewinds; he does not wake. Ender is pleading with him again. He looks exhausted. He looks like he’s about to collapse. He’s begging Alai to help him, to help Bonzo. “I don’t want to be a killer,” he says, tears running down his cheeks. “I don’t want to be the thing they want me to be.”

Graff raises his sidearm.

Somehow, Alai manages to unfreeze himself. He doesn’t know how. It doesn’t matter. He runs, right past Graff, and pulls Ender into an embrace. He puts his back between Graff’s gun and Ender’s body.

Together, they sink to the floor, Ender sobbing into Alai’s chest, getting tears and blood and water on his Battle School uniform. Alai holds him, strokes his hair. He stays silent. He meets Graff’s eyes, meets the barrel of his gun.

He does not flinch when Graff pulls the trigger.

* * *

One morning, they show up to breakfast, and the teacher that oversees them stops them on their way to the simulators. “You have free time until 0930.”

“We do?” Fly asks. “What for?”

“Is Ender alright?” Petra says.

“Today, if it goes well, will mark Andrew Wiggin’s graduation from Command School.” The teacher is standing at a casual parade rest. “We want you at your best.”

There are murmurs. None of them really believe it. None of them trust anything coming from the adults in their lives, after all the lies they’ve been through.

Even so, they peel off. Alai goes back to his room, prays over his desk as if he’s playing games, the way his mother taught him. At 0915, he gets up, does some stretches, and heads toward the simulation room.

They’re all set up, just waiting for the crackle that means Ender’s headset has been connected. When they hear it, finally, Ender says, “is everyone here?”

“All of us.” Bean speaks up. “Kinda late for practice this morning, aren’t you?”

“Sorry,” comes Ender’s reply. “I overslept.”

They laugh. He sounds exhausted, he sounds barely awake. As he guides them through the regular warmups, he starts to take on a little more energy, and they respond in kind. The simulator cleared, and they all waited, on tenterhooks, for the graded battle to appear.

It is like blinking into awakeness; a sudden brightness that fills their screen with more Formic ships than they have ever seen. They must be outnumbered ten, a hundred to one. The ships they’d been assigned were the oldest models; each of them commanded maybe two carriers with four fighters apiece, if that. In the background, a massive planet loomed, as if it were the launching zone for the fleet they saw ahead of them.

Above them, Ender is silent.

Did they ever mean to give him a fair chance? Or was their only goal to take the most brilliant leader the International Fleet has ever seen and grind him down into a powder, useless to anybody? No one could win this battle, not even Ender. What was the point of building him up to this? Just to break him back down?

After a few more seconds, Bean speaks. “Ender. The enemy’s gate is _down_.”

A few of the others laugh, wry; Ender’s old toon leaders from Dragon army. Ender laughs too. Whatever it is, it gets him moving again. He speaks in low, quick tones, telling Alai and Bean to form a bullet core, the other eight to wrap around them — they were going through the wall.

They head forward, press into the bulk of the enemy’s forces. They keep dodging, diving, heading for the planet — then they burst, fire out at random, dive and swoop and spiral. Half of their fighters are eaten up by Formic ships, but the remaining forty or so form back up at Ender’s command, dodging left, right, feinting.

They could all see what Ender was doing. They all knew what the little doctor did to starships; they could guess what it would do to a planet.

It was an insane move. In a real war, it would mean the most horrible loss of life ever seen. Ender was giving up. He was tired of the game. He wanted to prove he was finished, he didn’t want this. He was, almost literally, ready to go out with a bang.

He whispered the order, and the ships all dropped for the planet’s surface like their engines had been cut. They were all focusing their devices on the planet. Every one of the fighters would be eaten up, either in the atmosphere or the molecular disintegration field. All that would be left was the carriers, on the edges, waiting.

Sure enough, as the planet began to crumble, Alai’s two remaining fighters lost visual. He was switched out to his carrier, just in time to watch the game turn the planet into a spinning dust cloud.

He cheered. The other squadron leaders cheered. Above them, Ender was laughing, almost as if he was relieved.

It was over. Pass or fail, whatever they wanted from him, it was done. They didn’t get to have him anymore.

Ender didn’t turn off his microphone when he turned his headset off, not right away. Not before they could hear the adults in his simulator room cheering too, cheering, when they should be angry.

He hears Colonel Graff congratulate Ender, then others, then the old teacher who was always at Ender’s shoulder: “You made the hard choice, boy. All or nothing. End them or end us. But heaven knows there was no other way you could have done it. Congratulations. You beat them, and it's all over.”

Around Alai, the cheers have died down. The other squadron leaders look back and forth, nervous, taking off their headsets.

“What did he mean?” Dink asks. “Why are they happy? What did he mean, _them?”_

“Oh my god.” Petra sinks to her knees. “Oh my god, oh my god.”

Together, they were all coming to the same realization.

It had not been a game. They had been commanding real fighters, real launchers, real dreadnoughts. They had sent real men and women to die.

They had destroyed a planet. A real planet, with a real species on it. Gone, dead, wiped from existence, because they thought they were playing a game.

To Alai’s left, Petra is sobbing, silently, her hand pressed over her mouth. Bean looks numb. Carn has rushed to catch Shen, who has passed out.

Among them all, Alai is the only one still wearing a headset.

So, he is the only one who hears it: an anguished scream, like a glass shattering, then nothing at all.

**Author's Note:**

> so, uh.... yeah.
> 
> I might play around in this fandom a little more, but for now, I wanted to write about what it was like loving Ender while you watched him get destroyed. 
> 
> This includes some personal headcanons, such as Alai being made commander of Salamander army after Bonzo's death. 
> 
> The surname I gave Alai means "the flow of water" and also "the victorious one." Yes, it is a reference. 
> 
> I wish both Ender and Alai got more hugs in their life. Also all the other kids. 
> 
> Find me on [twitter!](https://twitter.com/nenyanarnyavilya)


End file.
